Gentian shatterlings of the House of Flowers travel the Galaxy to gather more memories and wisdom than one single human being could ever accumulate.

They were suspended in the atmosphere, each floating in a neutrally buoyant impasse bubble. The ships varied in dimension from the same size as Dalliance, five or six kilometres in length, to vessels in the same medium-size class as Silver Wings of Morning, twenty or thirty kilometres from end to end. One dagger of a ship was full fifty kilometres long; its red and white dazzle markings identified it as a Redeemer needle-craft. It looked impressive, but most of that ship would have been taken up with propulsion and field-generating equipment, with only a few cubic metres of living space somewhere near its middle. (Alastair Reynolds 2008.)

Songsworth: Campion’s Flower

Oubliette is a place to remember.

The zoku colony is near the prow of the city, in the Dust District, just above where the Atlas Quiet prepare Martian sand to bear the weight of the city. It is easy to see where the colony’s boundary lies: beneath the red dust clouds the wide avenues with their belle époque fronts and cherry trees give way to fairy-tale castles of diamond, like mathematics given physical form. (Hannu Rajaniemi 2010.)

Songsworth: Quantum Thief

The place he came from had no voice. It was the silent planet.

And then I see the night sky. The greater part of it is very like ours, though the depths are blacker and the stars brighter; but something that no terrestrial analogy will enable you fully to picture is happening in the west. Imagine the Milky Way magnified – the Milky Way seen through our largest telescope on the clearest night. And then imagine this, not painted across the zenith, but rising like a constellation behind the mountaintops – a dazzling necklace of lights brilliant as planets, slowly heaving itself up till it fills a fifth of the sky and now leaves a belt of blackness between it and the horizon. (C.S. Lewis 1938.)

Songsworth: Silent Planet

There is something out there, killing the stars. Before long, the entire Galaxy.

On the twenty-first of False Winter in the year 2956 since the founding of Neverness, the Vild Mission began its historic journey across the galaxy. In the black, cold, vacuum spaces above the City of Light, in orbit around the planet of Icefall, Lord Nikolos Sar Petrosian had called together a fleet of ships. And, of course, there were the lightships. Their number was 254. They were the glory of Neverness, these bright, shining slivers of spun diamond that could pierce the space beneath space and enter the unchartered seas of the manifold where there was neither time nor distance nor light. (David Zindell 1996.)

Songsworth: The Wild

“I was trying to comprehend the meaning of the words. That song did not come up in my research.”

Row row row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily merrily merrily merrily
Life is but a dream

Songsworth: Row row row your boat